Want to get the word out about your restaurant? Of course you do!

But that doesn’t necessarily mean you should run out and hire a publicist. In fact, if you’re like most clients who come to me because they want to hire a PR person, what you might need more (and first) is a good website.

The vast majority of diners — nearly 80% — look at a restaurant’s website before deciding to visit. In 2019, MGH, a marketing communications agency, published a survey of U.S. restaurant goers that found that 77% of them are likely to consult a website before making that all-important decision to spend their money at a particular establishment.

What does a website do that might make a person decide to dine at your restaurant?

• Convey a sense of your eatery’s general vibe. Is your place young and fun? Sophisticated and gastronomic? Super casual, or great for date night? Your website needs to convey that visually — through branding, including graphics, photos and general design.

• Tell your brand story. People love to have their interest piqued, and here’s where you can express what makes your restaurant stand apart from the rest. “Italian” spots are a dime a dozen. But maybe you’re a friendly, family-run, old-school red-sauce Italian-American place. Or a recent transplant from Rome specializing in Italian seafood and natural wines. Tell those stories, and you’ll draw a hungry crowd.

• Show the food — both in words and photos. An enticing picture of your barbacoa or bouillabaisse might be enough to convince a would-be guest to head your way or click for a reservation, or they might want to read the menu. They’ll also often be checking to see whether you’re in their price-range.

• Enable discoverability. What do people do when they’re looking for a good Japanese spot and nothing’s coming to mind? They Google “Japanese restaurant near me.” Or “best Japanese food in [fill in their city].” A well designed website will have what’s known as good SEO — search engine optimization. That way Google (the search engine) will rank your restaurant highly, and you’ll come up high on the page. It’s done by cleverly embedding the right key words and phrases into the site in a way that Google will respond to and reward with that primo ranking. Without that, coveted new customers are much less likely to find you.

• Food writers use Google, too — and if your restaurant ranks high in the search engine, they’re much likelier to click on the result and visit your site. If you have a good site that deliciously expresses your brand, they will then visit your restaurant.

Those are the most essential functions of a good restaurant website. Here are a few more things It can do:

• Display any kudos you’ve received — great press, including on a top 10 list, an important review. That’s not essential by any means, but you’ll definitely want to boast about it if you have that.

• Make it easy to reserve a table, purchase a gift card, order take-out, find out when you’re open.

Does that mean you need to spend a fortune on a brilliant site?

Absolutely not! You don’t need a brilliant site; you just need an attractive, simple site that does what it’s supposed to do. It doesn’t need a lot of bells and whistles — just good, clean design, great visuals, basic functionality and carefully crafted words.

Put off re-doing your mediocre website at your own peril

Yep, it’s super important to have a good one. A poor website experience virtually guarantees a potential guest will stay away.

• Poor design signals “this place is not cool.”

• A cheap, canned look suggests the restaurant will be too bare-bones, or even a dump.

• Slow page-loading suggests the restaurant doesn’t care about the user experience, and therefore perhaps won’t care about your experience as a guest.

• Dull photos do nothing to sell your food. Instead, the would-be guest will find another site where the food looks great, and go there.

• Inadequate SEO will lose you business to another restaurant whose good SEO ensures they land high in the search results.

Time to take stock

Take a spin through your own restaurant’s website, and see what you think. If you need it, we’re here to help.

I’m very fortunate that I get to meet and sometimes collaborate with many extremely interesting, talented and smart people in the course of my restaurant consulting business.

Yuyee Sakpanichkul and George Kaiho are two of them. Together they own Ka-Tip Thai Street Food in Dallas (Yuyee is chef), and George also runs the outstanding cocktail lounge Jettison. They’re doing so much right as restaurateurs and entrepreneurs that I thought I’d share some highlights.

I’ve been a huge fan of Ka-Tip since it debuted in 2019, and it gets even better and better as time goes on. There is no more exciting and talented Thai cook in North Texas than Yuyee, and the restaurant has been drawing Thai food lovers from all over Texas to enjoy the offerings.

(To be clear, Yuyee and George are not clients of mine, but friends; George and I collaborated last year creating a new cocktail program for an out-of-town client of mine, and Yuyee has generously shared her Thai cooking expertise with me as I’ve dived into the genre for my cooking website, Cooks Without Borders.)

Smart restaurateuring

Here are some of the beautiful things that are contributing to their success:

• They have created two businesses with great brand stories. Ka-Tip has an OUR STORY tab on its website; Jettison’s story is expressed on its ABOUT tab.

• Both websites are simple, clear, attractive and easy-to-navigate. That’s important because a restaurant’s website is the most essential way the business presents itself to the world. More than 70% of diners say they visit a restaurant’s website before deciding where to dine.

• Ka-Tip’s small physical space is attractive, simple and smart, making great use of every inch. A thoughtfully curated retail shelf offers Thai snacks and ingredients.

• Yuyee and George know how to market effectively. The restaurant is adjacent to the Dallas Farmers Market, which becomes jammed with people on weekends. Yesterday, a busy market day, they had set up a table outside — in view of the marketgoers — at which George was making knom kroc, coconut pancakes. The enticing aroma wafted toward the market, attracting new customers and activating the patio space. The activation was spot-on brand-wise: a delicious, sensory street food marketing moment for Ka-Tip Thai Street Food. Love it!

• Most importantly, both offer uncompromising quality. Ka-Tip may be tiny, but every dish delivers, and many knock it out of the park. Jettison’s cocktails are among the most outstanding in a city with a great cocktail scene. Yuyee and George know how to draw guests, and those guests return again and again because the experience is exceeds expectations.

Do check them out

If you find yourself in Dallas, swing by and treat yourself to some spectacular Thai food at Ka-Tip and cocktails at Jettison (reservations recommended). Be sure to keep your eyes open to take in all the smart, cool ways they’re maximizing potential. Oh, and by the way, that “reservations recommended” suggestion at Jettison is spot-on brand-wise. It’s a jewel-box of a bar with a vibe of connoisseurship, and “reservations recommended” underlines its specialness.

George Kaiho, co-owner of Ka-Tip Thai Street Food in Dallas, cooks knom kroc (coconut pancakes) outside next to Ka-Tip.

When I was a kid growing up in California in the early 1970s, a family friend took me to a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco called Sam Wo. It wasn’t known for its food, but rather for its abusive headwaiter, whose name I still remember — Edsel Ford (his full name was Edsel Ford Fung). It was a bustling, busy place in Chinatown. You had to climb up the stairs to get to the second floor (or was it third floor?), walking through a chaotic kitchen on the way to what I remember as a bare-bones dining room; I think we sat at a counter. I can’t remember what we ate, or what Mr. Fung yelled at us, but yell he did — he was known for commanding diners to “Sit down and shut up!” As a kid I found this hilarious.

As restaurant concepts go, this one may seem strange: We’re a Chinese restaurant with mediocre food and cartoonishly poor hospitality.

But it worked. In fact, people flocked to Sam Wo! The place was perpetually packed, for decades. It had been beloved by Beat poets in the ‘50s, popularized by famed San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen in the 60s and immortalized by writer Armistead Maupin in his “Tales of the City” novels (1978-2014).

Its last day of operation was in 2012. Edsel Ford was long gone (he passed away in 1984), the restaurant, infested with vermin, had been condemned, and the owner couldn’t afford to bring it up to code. That didn’t stop San Franciscans from making one last visit: There was a line out the door. 

Does this remind you of the Soup Nazi in “Seinfeld”? Me, too. Soup Nazi was fictional, but it was inspired by a midtown Manhattan stand called  Soup Kitchen International, which owner Ali Yegeneh 1989 ruled with an iron whisk. (Big difference: The soup in both was well worth the wait and abuse.)

I’m certainly not suggesting that if you want to open a restaurant, or make the one you’re already operating more successful, that you should be nasty to your guests. In fact I would strongly recommend the opposite. But I am suggesting that if you want to succeed, you need a concept that’s easy to explain and that stands out. Ideally it will be a concept that suggests an experience — one that your guests will tell their friends about after they dine there.

What’s a viable concept?

A restaurant that’s a viable concept is special — in some way. It offers an experience you’ll want to tell your friends about; it has a story to tell. A great concept is one that’s unique, one where you’d be excited to go even if you’d never heard of the people behind it. In some cases, it could also be something that exists in other cities or towns, but not yours.

“I’m a really good chef, and I’m opening a restaurant” is not a viable concept. It’s too squishy. Unless you live in a very small town, even if you’re known among well informed foodies, your name (unfortunately) probably won’t mean anything to most people in your community.

Not even the best known chefs in the country, people like Nancy Silverton or David Chang, would be so silly as to think that “I’m Nancy Silverton and I’m opening a restaurant” was a concept. And yet every year, in every city and town across America, such non-concepts attract investors and manage to get opened. After their splashy openings and moments in the media spotlight fade — a few months in, maybe a year if they’re very lucky and very good — they struggle mightily to attract guests. That’s because they don’t tell a story that makes people want to show up.

Here are some concepts that are not viable, or not even concepts:

• We’re a farm-to-table restaurant

• We’re an Italian restaurant

• We’re a New American restaurant with [fill-in-the-blank — French, Spanish, Mediterranean, Japanese] influences

• We’re a chef-driven neighborhood restaurant

• We’re a wine bar

Well, what’s wrong with those?

Farm-to-table restaurant. This was perhaps a viable concept 15 years ago, before the trend ballooned and the phrase became a meaningless, tired cliché. In truth, all produce and meats come from a farm, even if it’s an industrial farm, and wind up on a table. But it could be a concept, if you could make it meaningful again. For instance, are you a farmer who wants to invite the public to dine in your barn, maybe take a look at your fields and greenhouses first, then have a fabulous dinner (served family-style!) based on what’s just been harvested? That’s a concept. (Picture the story they tell they friends, who, of course, have to go there.)

Italian restaurant. That’s a reasonable starting point for a concept, but it needs to be fleshed out. Are you an over-the-top Italian spot where it’s impossible to get a reservation and we’re going to charge you an arm and a leg? That’s a concept that’s making its owners a fortune. Are you an Italian spot that serves only antipasti and pastas but no main courses, because pastas are really what people want? That’s a concept that’s been flourishing for nearly a decade. Are you an Italian spot focused around a mozzarella bar? That’s the fabulous concept that Nancy Silverton opened in 2007, Osteria Mozza. When it opened, all of foodie L.A. was abuzz with the idea that you could go there and there Silverton would be crafting little snacks from mozzarella behind that bar — that was a great story to tell your friends the next day.

New American with fill-in-the-blank influences. For starters, the phrase “New American” is passé. “New American” was new 40 years ago, in 1983. Modern American is a little better, but if it’s just that with some kind of accent, that’s not terribly compelling. Are you Taiwanese American, or Modern Brazilian or Upscale American Diner? Go for it, and push it far— do something fresh!

Chef-driven neighborhood restaurant. This is marginally better than “I’m a chef and I’m opening a restaurant,” but not by much. First, we are in a culture where chefs are no longer universally revered. A backlash against chef culture (abusive chefs with outsized egos, kitchen workplaces than have been misogynistic, racist and homophobic, etc) has encouraged a shift towards restaurants where it’s more about the vibe and the food than it is about the star behind it. Neighborhood restaurants are in (though too broad to be a viable concept). Chef-driven neighborhood restaurants? I believe their glow is fading. Also, if you’re the owner and you’re hiring that chef, or partnering with that chef, what happens when that chef leaves? Your concept falls apart. If you’re a neighborhood restaurant, what kind of neighborhood restaurant? What distinguishes you? Why should people spend their hard-earned-money to give you a try? And are you priced approachably enough to feel like a neighborhood restaurant?

Wine bar. Let’s try a dialogue. You: “I went to a wine bar last night.” Your friend: “Oh, cool. What kind of wine bar?” You: “Oh, I don’t know — a wine bar.” Friend: “Was it a natural wine bar?” You: “Well, maybe they have a few natural wines; I’m not sure.” Friend: “What kind of food do they serve?” You: “Oh, I don’t know — the usual — some charcuterie, some cheese, a few snacks. Salads. Sandwiches.” Friend: “Is it kind of French?” You: “Well, no — maybe a little Mediterranean. It was really good!” Your friend says maybe she’ll try it some time. She never does.

Here’s a different dialogue. You: “I went to a really cool French wine bar last night.” Friend: “Oh, what was it like?” You: “They have mostly natural wines, all from France, and delicious things that go with them — charcuterie, little French plates like leeks vinaigrette, brandade and crusty bread, stuff like that. For dessert they make an incredible Chartreuse soufflé.”

See what I mean? It’s specific, and well concepted. It gives you a story to tell. Your friend is there the very next night.

If you want to open a successful restaurant, dream up a viable, original concept, and then run with it.

We’ll soon be bringing you dispatches from the restaurant consulting front — sharing the secret sauce that will help you make your restaurant or food business as delightful, busy, profitable and satisfying to you as it can be. Watch this space!